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Paris Attacks Would Not Have Happened Without Crypto (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes with a story at Ars Technica, citing a Yahoo News interview, that National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers has explicitly blamed the terrorist attacks which struck Paris last November on communications backed by strong crypto. From the article:
Because of encrypted communications, he said, "we did not generate the insights ahead of time. Clearly, had we known, Paris would not have happened."
Rogers did not explicitly re-launch the campaign waged by FBI director James Comey to force technology companies to provide a "golden key" to encrypted communications. Rogers called encryption "foundational to our future" and added that arguing over encryption backdoors was "a waste of time." But he did say that encryption was making the job of the NSA and law enforcement more difficult.
The interview comes shortly after the FBI won an order requiring Apple to provide technical means to bypass the security measures preventing them from unlocking the iPhone 5C belonging to Syed Rizwan Farook. Farook, along with his wife, are responsible for the December mass shooting in San Bernardino, California."
Syed Rizwan Farook: political power grab to set a precedent for forcing manufacturers to decrypt the private data of their customers. both shooters are dead. their motive and operation are both known. we're chasing ghosts to advance an agenda.
attacks which struck Paris last November: are the result of a determined minority of disenfranchised extremists with nothing left to lose. a 65 year policy of proxy wars and foreign backed government coups to install lifelong dictators has left them jaded and dead inside. these are truly desperate people, clinging to $diety for some hope of retribution and justice against a system of international dominionist and interventionalist policy that has ultimately led them to perpetual misery. the solution is not to backdoor every crypto, but make structural and systemic changes in a concerted multinational fashion to help reduce and eliminate the instances of and impact from blind foreign intervention to advance imperialistic goals championed by 18th century conquistadors and feudal lords.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Crooks and terrorists won't care about a ban, and the "law abiding" people will be left entirely vulnerable to those crooks and criminals.
I doubt anyone can tell if any given post is using a strong or weakened cipher, at least not without some deep analysis of the data, effectively ruling out internet traffic, meaning their only "effective" ban would be to ban anything not sent in clear text.
I'm no psychic, but I can easily see how well that'll play out.
> "Yet the TLA's totally screwed the pooch on 9/11."
Yet they knew Bin Laden was to attack USA, they knew he would capture planes and fly them into buildings and all they needed was for Bush to sign off on a meeting with the FBI, since the separation of domestic and foreign intelligence required the President sign off on it.
Yet he wouldn't.
Presumably because "Bin Laden" is from the Bin Ladens that bailed out his Arbusto business.
Bush screwed the pooch.
What you believe isn't necessarily what is "generally believed" anywhere in the world, USA or otherwise. I have been on 3 different continents since 9/11 and talked to literally thousands of people and not one person (who used logic in any other part of their lives) has indicated they have any belief that the US government was behind those attacks. The only people I've ever seen indicate that are "anti-establishment" types who are either seriously strung out on drugs (or were at one point) or are proponents of anarchy. I've never met a single person who presented reasonable evidence (not hearsay) to support the claim that the US government did it. The talk of jet fuel burning temperature and melting point of steel and all that other nonsense is demonstrably proven false every single time. Every single bit of "evidence" to show the government did this. Now, tell me they knew something was going to happen and failed to act and I'd believe that in a heartbeat.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
It's not quite that simple. There's an apocryphal story that right after the Cold War ended, senior officials from the KGB and CIA met one night for drinks and got to talking about their espionage exploits. The CIA people said how easy it must've been for the KGB to infiltrate an open society like the U.S. Able to blend in with the population, travel freely, and get access to documents while posing as regular citizens. The KGB people said on the contrary it was extraordinarily difficult. While the U.S. secrets were mostly all out there, they were mixed in with an ocean of tabloid and conspiracy publications an open society produces. They had to waste tremendous resources trying to figure out of that National Enquirer story about the U.S. having captured aliens and their UFO was made up, or if there really was some truth behind it.
That's what you have to deal with with open publications. Yeah western inellignece can read Dabiq. But ISIS also knows that they can read it. Thus it becomes a perfect platform for feeding western intelligence agencies disinformation. Anything that's openly published that way has to be taken with a huge grain of salt unless it's corroborated by other intelligence. The reason why intelligence agencies are so desperate to break crypto is because if you're encrypting something, you're presumably doing so because it contains information you don't want foreign intelligence agencies to read. Thus it is precisely the type of stuff intelligence agencies want to be able to read.
That's not to say we should roll over and let NSA put backdoors in everything. If they get that, then ISIS knows and can start poisoning their encrypted communications with disinformation, while pulling their real communication behind a higher level of encryption. No, in order for what the NSA wants to work, they would have to insert backdoors but also keep those backdoors secret from the public. My best guess is the western intelligence agencies are raising the spectre of backdoors in encryption software they know they can't break, in the hopes it scares groups like ISIS into using different encryption tools. Perhaps ones they can already break. Or maybe ISIS will try to write their own encryption software, which is notoriously difficult and can easily result in flaws which can be exploited by intelligence agencies to help them crack it.